


if I had to perish twice

by seek_its_opposite



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Aging, Episode: s01e03 Squeeze, Episode: s02e19 Død Kalm, F/M, Pre-The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008), mulder and scully do nothing in order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-17 23:26:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14841219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seek_its_opposite/pseuds/seek_its_opposite
Summary: He thinks maybe they’re working backwards to something like new love.





	if I had to perish twice

**Author's Note:**

> Robert Frost gets some credit and the X-Files makeup department gets none

They almost died on a ship called the _Ardent_ , hung out to dry by passion. He thinks it’s funny. He thinks it’s a warning. He thinks, as he answers his door and finds her waiting, that he isn’t heeding it.

“Scully.” A question.

“Want to go for a run?”

 _Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice._ And some (he read Scully’s notes) say that after the ice, a wolf will come to swallow the sun. Everlasting darkness, the ink in Scully’s pen spilled out across the world. He’s almost met that kind of death twice this year already, and it really was just like falling asleep. His body fought both every step of the way.

It was shameful to fade into a cold, heavy nothing, _for_ nothing, and then worse to face his shame: There were some deaths that weren’t good enough for him. Scully told him through cracked lips that there was nothing to fear about dying and he’d almost slipped up and told her—if he hadn’t been halfway unconscious he probably would have told her. It isn’t some hypothetical hereafter he’s afraid of. It’s a death that doesn’t save her.

She jogs through the trees a few paces behind him, ponytail coming loose at the sides and curling around her face. Her cheeks are flushed in the sharp pre-dawn chill. He can see her breath. Scully is young and alive and the hands that lay flat last year against hospital sheets are now balled into fists. The captain’s daughter is too steady on her sea legs to be thrown off by almost dying of old age at 31.

But when she clicks into the office a few hours later with an efficient “Good morning,” she doesn’t mention the run, and maybe that means she needed it too.

—

After Tooms broke into Scully’s apartment Mulder took her to his. She sat barefoot on his couch with her knees at her chin, fingers wrapped around his New York Knicks mug and the first hint of a bruise on her ankle. He splashed water on his face when he saw it.

“A century,” she said, more to her tea than to him. So he just nodded.

“He looked so young,” she continued. “To have been here so long.” It sounded more like small talk than any conversation they'd had in weeks, and he understood then that she needed to fill the silence.

“He wasn’t awake for much of it,” Mulder offered.

“That’s just it." Scully straightened to look at him. “All those lives destroyed just so he wouldn’t die. He wasn’t even living, Mulder. He just wasn’t dying.”

He said, “I guess even mutants have an instinct for self-preservation.”

She went back to staring at her mug. “If it came at someone else’s expense, I couldn’t do it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Nice place, by the way.”

—

Some say the world will end in ice, clenched in the jaws of a mythical wolf. From what he’s tasted of desire, ice is running a losing campaign. In a lone ship taking on water in the Norwegian Sea, Scully saved him with pages filled with measured cursive, chronicling their deaths until her hand gave way, and he saw that as fire. The hottest flames burn blue.

Mulder has never felt as damned by what he hates as he has by what he loves.

He bites back a “Thank you” to Scully because if he thanks her for coming along she’ll know he means _I’m sorry_. Anyway, he doesn’t know how to draw the line between this time and all the others, or even if there is a line to draw. The Scully who drained a snow globe for him to drink is the same Scully who signs his expense reports, who covers for him when he’s late for a meeting, who shook his hand the day they met. It seems like ego to thank a scientific constant for orbiting him.

The words come out at a red light, on their way to a meeting for a case that goes nowhere. He thanks her. Shit. She shifts to look at him, eyebrows raised, and even that’s almost too much.

"For everything you did on the ship,” he clarifies. "I never thanked you."

She relaxes, almost imperceptibly. “Of course, Mulder.” Whatever she was worried he might mean, he thinks, he did.

—

When he woke up, according to Scully, the first thing he asked was how he looked. He doesn’t remember how she answered. He does remember her spouting medical jargon over the phone to keep Skinner from paying them a visit those first few days.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, bleach-scented pillows digging into his back and a pile of cards on the table between them, “I think you look dignified.”

“Mulder, shut up.”

He tasted iron on his lip when he smiled. “I’m serious,” he insisted, pretending to rearrange his cards. “Exactly how I picture the future head of the Bureau.”

She shook her head, spread her cards out like a fan, and cleared her throat. “Go fish.”

—

The next time she shows up for a run, he’s dressed and ready. When she pauses to stretch he looks back, just for a second. Trondheim drowned in what he hoarded.

—

Later, years later, they buy a house. They fill it with flea market furniture, paid for in cash, and arrange it so they know exactly how they’ll push it all against the door when they’re found. They don’t fix the creaky boards on the porch.

He goes for a run the morning after their first night— _not far, Scully, I’ll be back in an hour_ —and she presses a key into his palm and stays in the house and waits. He gets back in 35 minutes and she kisses him like it was a week. They have sex on their brand new mattress.

They prime the bedroom walls in the slanting late-afternoon light and she gets paint in her hair when she tucks it behind her ears, streaking it white. He tells her not to wash it out quite yet. “There must be a diner around here, right? Maybe you can get us the senior discount.” He pulls her down from the ladder and right into his arms, and she laughs through her protests, grabbing a fistful of his shirt.

He says, “I never did carry you over the threshold.”

She says, “What are you waiting for?”

He thinks maybe they’re working backwards to something like new love. They saw each other old and dying before they swore in a one-stoplight town to have and to hold ‘til death do them part. Her first time in his apartment was after an attack. Her last time, they fell asleep tangled in the shirts he was supposed to be packing.

He told her once that nothing is ancient in the universe, but by the time they buy their first house on a runaway budget, he understands that it’s the other way around: Everything is. The stars are billions of years old and still lighting their front yard. They throw a blanket onto the roof and climb out the upstairs window with a bottle of wine, and they sit beneath the sky as it once was.

When he thanks her now, which he does all the time, she never has to ask what for.


End file.
